Monday, August 09, 2004
(6:57 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Every birth of meaning
I.From Middlesex:
What can I say about my well-bred, small-nosed, trust-funded schoolmates? Descended from hardworking, thrifty industrialists (there were two girls in my class who had the same last names as American car makers), did they show aptitudes for math or science? Did they display mechanical ingenuity? Or a commitment to the Protestant work ethic? In a word: no. There is no evidence against genetic deteminism more persuasive than the children of the rich. [They] didn't study. They never raised their hands in class. They sat in the back, slumping, and went home each day carrying the prop of a notebook. (But maybe [they] understood more about life than I did. From an early age they knew what little value the world placed in books, and so didn't waste their time with them. Whereas I, even now, persist in believing that these black marks on white paper bear the greatest significance, that if I keep writing I might be able to catch the rainbow of consciousness in a jar. The only trust fund I have is this story, and unlike a prudent Wasp, I'm dipping into the principal, spending it all...)II.
To copy Long Pauses, my song of the moment is "At least that's what you said" by Wilco, from the new album.
III.
Yesterday I watched the movie Last Night, which traces the actions of a few people on the day when it has been announced that the world will end at midnight. At the very beginning of the movie, the premise is laughable, and I was almost expecting a comedy -- but it's not a comedy. It's also not a sci-fi movie. The whole problem of the end of the world -- what exactly is going to bring it to an end? how do they know? what was the government response? -- never becomes the focus. There is none of the masturbatory fascination of long monologues in which characters spout off technical jargon, real or imagined. People have known for a couple of months that the world was going to end, and to the extent that details come up, they come up casually, as in conversation, without excessive explanation. Because of this restraint, the viewer is drawn into the situation completely and can identify intensely with the characters.
One minor character has finally arranged for a recital at a prestigious concert hall, at 11:00 of the last night. He is not portrayed sympathetically -- he keeps one of the main protagonists from meeting her goal -- but the scene cuts periodically back to his playing. What does one play on the last night of the world? Modern atonal music. Monica said she'd prefer something more joyful on the last night, but to me, the music seemed completely right. I would choose to go to that concert on my last night. I might even choose to be the one to put on the concert.
In playing atonal music, I would be participating in the dissolution of the world, and it would be beautiful. What is the world other than our subjective engagement -- our "care"? Atonal music seems to me to eclipse that. The music is intensely artificial, mathematical even, but as such it is pure sound arranged in a way that cannot be intuitively identified. It is objective music. No, even more objective than objective: music without a subject. Music after, or before, a subject.
IV.
I am beginning to read the first volume of von Balthasar's Glory of the Lord, an attempt to do theology starting from beauty. He says the standard things about how our age has lost sight of beauty, as of all the higher values -- and I'll admit it: I try, but I lose track of beauty. My selection of texts to study is usually dictated by aesthetics -- I find Barth to be a seductive writer; I can't imagine a more literary philosopher than Derrida; even Zizek, in his earlier works, has some real moments -- but academic careerism is an insidious thing. What can I make for myself out of this text? How can I get ahead using this text? Can I manipulate this text in such a way that it will add a couple more lines to my CV? It is possible to do academic work in such a way that it allows the text to be what it is -- but how many academics really love the text? If all of them do, how clear is it?
We're not allowed to love. We must critique -- in an impoverished sense, not in the Kantian sense. Where is this inadequate? How can I become superior to the text to whom I owe everything? And, worse yet: morally superior. We have an academy full of moralizers, left and right -- moralizers who don't know how to say yes.
I want to say yes. I want to learn how to say yes. As a certain kind of Christian -- that's what I am at the moment, no matter how hard I try not to be, no matter how many Sundays I miss, no matter how much I resent the pettiness of my fellow Christians (and thereby come to share in it) -- I cannot stop moralizing. I think back to my first encounters with philosophy, and I am embarrassed. I was willing to go on a moral crusade against evil philosophies (Kant, Hegel), armed with the good ones. Postmodernism, that delightfully useless term, was the way, the truth, and the light -- if only we would have known! Then the Holocaust wouldn't have happened! If only Hegel hadn't written such an evil book, then children wouldn't be starving. Oh, Descartes, how could you have ever devised such a torturous mechanism as subjectivity, upon which we torment and deform the alterity of the other [autre]?
V.
Barth has a passage on Schleiermacher, the ghost who haunts his entire work in much the same way that Hegel haunts that of Derrida, in which he says that even if we believe an author's works to have been inadequate or to have had horrible effects, we can still take a certain pleasure in their having been how they were. Barth learned how to say yes toward the end of his life -- in the worst of all possible circumstances, in the conclusion and aftermath of World War II and the beginning of the Cold War, he learned how to say yes. I'm trying to learn. I wish that someone had taught me. If someone tried, I wish I would have been able to listen, but I had all my defenses up, all my moralizing -- an exhausting project, maintaining all the right alliances, intellectual and otherwise, fighting the good fight (against what? to what end?), training for a rewarding career in being correct. A career of humiliating others and then laughing it off, washing my hands of my own cutting words.
Artful ambiguity as a weapon. I am impossible to understand, by design. It's rare for someone to simply ask the naive question, "What do you mean?" -- and I can't tell you how much I hate it when they do, how exhausting it is to explain. I parse out the references, the pronouns and antecedents, the differing voices in which I was speaking -- and none of it touches on the question of why I had to say it in that form and what I thought I was saying in the first place.
So exhausting to go through that, when I want to say: "I'm just talking because I want to talk to you. This is how I get my jouissance -- through language. I want to share that with you. Please don't take me literally. Don't turn my words into a patient etherized on a table. I speak, I write, because that is when I am free -- that is the only freedom I know. Please don't take that away from me. Please trust me when I say that in all that I say, I am producing a written text for you, verbally -- a good written text, I hope, perhaps even a beautiful one. That is my gift for you. I made it for you. I write for you. It's the only gift I know how to give, and I hope you can accept it -- but if you can't, that's okay. There will be someone else, and even if there isn't -- even if there isn't...."
